Everything Gets Smaller When You Look Back at It
Some days I want to abandon the present entirely—job, apartment, whatever adult obligation is sitting on the counter—and go back to watching Pokémon reruns in my underwear with a bowl of something sugary and absolutely nowhere to be. Not because those days were better. They probably weren’t. It’s the permission I miss.
Going back through old posts gives me a version of that. Not the feeling, but the texture—what seemed worth writing about, what felt urgent, what I thought deserved a paragraph. Some of it holds up better than I expected.
There was an essay about roommate life: about the accidental intimacy of shared apartments, about people who weren’t your family becoming your emergency contacts through nothing more than proximity. About leaving the gas on and being saved by whoever was in the next room. About locking yourself out in December at minus twelve degrees, sleepwalking into an allergic reaction. The quiet structural dependency of living with strangers. I still think about that one.
There was an interview with Brooke Nipar, an American photographer who had already put Amy Winehouse, Bat For Lashes, and Lykke Li in front of her camera and made them look true to themselves, which sounds easy until you watch most photographers try and fail. She talked about her grandfather’s legacy, about being in love as a particular kind of affliction. Sharp interview. I was a little dazzled by her.
Tokyo came up, as it always did. A piece about Miri Matsufuji and the specific relief of finding a genuinely human person in a city that seems engineered to produce only archetypes. Shibuya at night does something to your sense of reality—everyone too perfect, too composed, too much. When someone just laughs a real laugh, the whole city recalibrates.
Dana Goldstein made photographs of people with enormous carved pumpkins over their heads. I published it without explanation and I’d do it again.
And ketamine—a piece on the drug’s then-emerging use in treating depression, back when citing that research still made people raise an eyebrow. It’s only gotten more credible since. The loop is genuinely strange: the molecule people were taking in club toilets to temporarily vacate their bodies turned out to be one of the more promising treatments for people who feel like they can’t bear to stay in theirs. The universe has opinions about irony.